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“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.”

He talks about the work of Tristan Harris and The Centre for Humane Technology from whose website I have taken a page.

What began as a race to monetize our attention is now eroding the pillars of our society: mental health, democracy, social relationships, and our children.

What we feel as addiction is part of something much bigger.

There’s an invisible problem that’s affecting all of society.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google have produced amazing products that have benefited the world enormously. But these companies are also caught in a zero-sum race for our finite attention, which they need to make money. Constantly forced to outperform their competitors, they must use increasingly persuasive techniques to keep us glued. They point AI-driven news feeds, content, and notifications at our minds, continually learning how to hook us more deeply—from our own behavior.

Unfortunately, what’s best for capturing our attention isn’t best for our well-being:

Like this:

Taken from John Naughton’s blog post “Global Warning” about Nick Harkaway’s new novel Gnomon where he shares the author’s blogpost which you can read in full here. These paragraphs struck a chord with me.

…..I remember the luxury of saying “we must be precautionary about surveillance laws, about human rights violations, because one day the liberal democracies might start electing monsters and making bad pathways, and we’ll want solid protections from our governments’ over-reach.”

Oops.

I remember the halcyon days of April 2016 when I thought I’d missed the boat and I hadn’t written a warning at all, but a sort of melancholic state of the nation, and I really did think things might get better from there. Then Brexit came – I was half expecting that – and then Trump – which I was really not – and now here we are, with the UK boiling as May’s government and Corbyn’s Labour sit on their hands and clock ticks down and the negotiating table is blank except for a few sheets of crumpled scrap paper, and the only global certainty seems to be that this US administration will try to wreck every decent thing the international community has attempted in my lifetime, with the occasional connivance of our own leaders when they aren’t busy tearing one another to bits.

At the heart of the judgment in Richard v BBC lies the significant determination that “as a matter of general principle, a suspect has a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to a police investigation”.

…..the judgment provides a useful opportunity to consider a long standing and unprincipled disparity between the treatment of doctors and that of dental professionals in the context of fitness to practise investigations….

….Doctors referred to the Interim Orders Tribunal (IOT) can be confident that their hearing will be held in private, unless they specifically elect for a public hearing….

….In stark contrast, dental professionals appearing before the Interim Orders Committee (IOC) of the GDC face a public hearing, unless they can persuade the Committee to exercise its discretion and sit in private….